Forum Moderators: martinibuster
here are the few changes/actions i made and exogenous incidents that may have had an impact:
- as some of you said, the presence of cpm ads may lower your daily earnings compared to cpc only ads. what i do not understand: why does google state, that cpm ads should have a positive impact on your earnings? in theory, all ad forms (cpc and cpm) compete in your ad space for the best performance, right? in practice, this obviously doesn't work well, as most ww members say and which now is definitely my experience, too.
- interestingly, the downturn started around the time the "advertise on this site" link came into effect (end of november). therefore increasing cpm ads in the mix of ads competing for your ad space and worsening the problem. although i wasn't able to make out one single advertiser who has used this feature on my site so far. maybe the new link emphasizes the ad too much as an ad and therefore triggers low converting clicks from users who are curious how it all works but who are not interested in the concrete ad itself? maybe other useres who have clicked before are now deterred, because they realize, that this is an ad block? i'll still give the link a try for a few days, but if there is no change in the bad stats, an action is absolutely necessary.
- i changed my standard ad type from "text only" to "text and image". hardly any image ads to be seen on my sites, so why should this have an impact? maybe the selection itself has a bad influence on pricing? maybe you have to avoid changes in any case to not disturb the smart pricing algorithm? i have the feeling, that smart pricing hates changes in any way!
- at this time (end of november) i also sent an email to the adsense team. it was an issue with an ad block in an iframe which i wanted to place google image ads into. i asked them to review my site and if my implementation was ok. that triggered a manual review and they answered, that my approach was not accurately ok with their guidelines. i must say, that the employee obviously didn't understand my concern, but to be on the safe side, i refused to respond, dropped my plan immediately and left the site uncritical as before.
considering the collapse of my earnings, my speculation is, that there is a kind of "trust history" for every website participating in the adsense program, containing the issues of the past correspondence.
if a contact with the adsense team effects a manual review, then the employee ranks your site according to the perceived trust on a scale. if something is inconsistent, you are downgraded.
the trust index might be part of the smart pricing algorithm, directly influencing your income. if something is perceived as fishy by the adsense reviewer, then you could risk your earning potential.
this might be far fetched, but since i want to have an explanation for my situation, i consider something like that to be possible.
anyway, i would never consult the adsense team anymore with issues that could be (falsely) perceived as questionable publisher tactics.
ok, please don't complain about the massive guesswork here. as i said, this is pure speculation, but since we don't know much about how smart pricing works, i just wanted to share it with you. i am really worried right now and after a couple of months flying high, at least i can understand the antipathy against this to my mind unstable site evaluation attempt called smart pricing.
To put it another way, EPC can go down for reasons other than smart pricing.
Sorry to say it twice, but the first three items you mention are not smart-pricing related. Instead, they relate to:
1) the effect of CPM ads, which you think may be appearing on your site.
2) changes in visitor behavior, possibly connected to the "advertise on this site" link.
3) and changing the type of ad that can appear on your site.
Your fourth item is a speculation about a trustworthiness factor getting plugged into the smart pricing calculation. Interesting idea, but as you acknowledged, it's speculative.
IMO, you need to look into factors other than smart pricing that could cause EPC to drop.
Here are a few that occur to me:
1) In many parts of the world, this is a big gift-giving season. Online shopping for gifts could be causing your visitor's behavior to change, and this could be effecting the ads they click on or don't click on.
2) One or more advertisers may have scaled back their bidding or dropped out altogether.
3) Your traffic may be steady in numbers but have a different mix of people in it.
4) You added some advertisers to your block list.
And others may occur to you. I went into all this because I think it's really dangerous to attribute drops in earnings to smart pricing. People do that, and then they stop thinking. Don't use smart pricing as an amorphous catchall for things going wrong. Try to break down what might be happening and think how you can counteract it.
In 2004, I had a steady decline in earnings over a period of several months, down to about about half what I had been earning earlier in the year. Since it started when G. introduced SP, part of it was probably connected to SP, but part of it was probably other things. I played around with ad layout and position and color, took ads off some pages and put them on others, tried AdLinks when they came out, and now my earnings are 4 times what they fell to, double their early 2004 peak.
Did I find a way to "beat" smart pricing? Who knows? But it worked, and you can do the same.
nitrous, 3 websites, 500-1000 clicks, 5000-10000 visitors/day.
due to my stats history, i consider the trend to be evident.
I am experiencing the same as you since last month. I didn't change anything on my site. In Nov, my EPC dropped steadily. This month, my CTR has dropped by 2%. At first I thought EPC change was caused by smart pricing as I had experienced before and it might come back. yes, it is back a little, but I have never seen such a big drop in CTR which was alwasy between 7-8%.
CTR drop makes me nervous.
I see a drop from lowish teens to mid single figures over the last three months or so. It was steady for two years. Earnings (400+ average clicks daily at the moment) have not dropped though. Visitors have increased a little.
Seems like less clicks, and more targeted visitors are getting about the same amount of income (around the 100 mark) every day regardless!
Something weird is happening. Slowly. I suspect that people (dummies!) are gradually learning that google ads are ads! Helped lately by "advertise on this site"... And as such clicks are more meaningfull but less frequent. So conversion is better and epc stays higher. At least on real, genuine - content first - sites.
Something weird is happening. Slowly. I suspect that people (dummies!) are gradually learning that google ads are ads! Helped lately by "advertise on this site"...
That's possible, but should have occured gradually. For me my CRT had been quite stable for the past years. It only started to drop significantly at the beginning of this month. So the drop can not be explained by users' habit.
as some of you said, the presence of cpm ads may lower your daily earnings compared to cpc only ads. what i do not understand: why does google state, that cpm ads should have a positive impact on your earnings? in theory, all ad forms (cpc and cpm) compete in your ad space for the best performance, right? in practice, this obviously doesn't work well, as most ww members say and which now is definitely my experience, too.
In the most simplistic model, if CPM ads raise Google's profits and Google doesn't change the portion it shares with publishers, Google can honestly say that on the whole CPM ads have a positive effect on income. I think it is more complicated than that - I think Google does try to boost a site's income when it shows CPM ads, but a lot of random factors can come into play (overexposure to identical CPM ads causing ad blindness to CPC ads, by chance hitting "good clickers" with CPM ads and "bad clickers" with CPC ads, what works for Google's algorithm for an "average site" or "average page" with a targeted keyword doesn't hold true for your site and your above-expected performance on CPC is reduced by introduction of CPM, etc.)
I had a poor experience with image ads similar to some of what I have seen with CPM ads - limited inventory resulting in overexposure, banner blindness and reduced revenue. But I do believe Google when they say that many other sites do better by permitting image ads.
f a contact with the adsense team effects a manual review, then the employee ranks your site according to the perceived trust on a scale. if something is inconsistent, you are downgraded.
I do think that they maintain a trust rank for each publisher, and that can play a role in the number of PSA's served and probably also in earnings. But my experience with their support staff has been that any corrective action is seen immediately - no later than the end of the next day's stats - and the effect has been consistent. The metaphor for my experience: It's not like they slowly turn dials - they flip switches.
I would consider contacting them. (More accurately, if it were me, I would contact them.)
